Microsoft teams up with Cisco to modernize data centers

On Wednesday, at the Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft and networking solutions giant Cisco, inked a new multi-year agreement. The partnership will result in deeper integration across their data center portfolios and benefit their mutual channel partners with joint Cisco and Microsoft technologies.

The partnership is aimed at better integration between Cisco and Microsoft cloud and data center technologies. "Today at the Microsoft WPC, Cisco announced a multi-year sales and go-to-market agreement with Microsoft designed to modernize data centres through the delivery and acceleration of integrated solutions," Cisco said in a statement.

The agreement will see both the firms invest in join sales, engineering and marketing resources to enhance the integrated solutions for enterprises and service provider data centres.

"Cisco and Microsoft agree to a three-year go-to-market plan focused on transforming data centres through the delivery of integrated solutions for enterprise customers and service providers," Cisco said.

The companies have planned to focus on six countries in the first year -- US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, and Australia -- and will eventually expand to other countries in the following two years of the agreement’s remaining time. Both the companies have said that they will align partner incentive programmes to accelerate solutions via mutual channel partners.

The companies also said that their sales teams will work together on cloud and data centre opportunities, which includes an initial programme focused on the migration of Windows 2003 customers to Windows 2012 R2 on the Cisco UCS platform. It’s noteworthy to mention that Microsoft formally ends support for Windows Server 2003 on July 14, 2015.